Hecatonchires

Also Known As: also Hecatoncheires, the Hundred-Handed Ones, Centimanes; individually Cottus, Briareus/Aegaeon, and Gyges
Region/Culture: Southern Europe / Ancient Greece
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: Each of the three brothers had fifty heads set on a single pair of shoulders and one hundred irresistible arms, able to hurl a barrage of boulders all at once.
Role in Mythos: They are the storm-giant allies whose overwhelming force decides the war between the Olympians and the Titans, after which they stand as jailers of Tartarus.
Relation to Humans: They belong to the deep cosmic past and are far removed from ordinary mortals, known to people mainly through the poets’ accounts of the world’s first wars. Homer records that mortals called Briareus by a different name, Aegaeon, than the one the gods used.

The air above the battlefield darkened before the first stone came down. Three hundred boulders left the hands of three brothers in a single throw, and the sky over the Titans filled with falling rock the way a valley fills with floodwater. Something that had been shut in the dark for a very long time had been let out, and it had brought the mountains with it.

The Hecatonchires were three, and each was built on a scale that ordinary description cannot hold. Fifty heads rose from a single vast pair of shoulders, and from those shoulders grew a hundred arms, every hand strong enough to close on a hillside and tear it free. Cottus, Briareus, and Gyges were their names. Their strength was not the neat, decisive kind that settles a duel. It was closer to weather, the sort of force that moves coastlines and buries armies, and it worked best when there was a great deal of it to move.

They were among the eldest things in the world, born to Uranus the sky and Gaia the earth in the same brood that produced the twelve Titans and the three one-eyed Cyclopes. The poets disagree about the order. Hesiod puts the hundred-handers last, the final and most monstrous of that first generation; the mythographer Apollodorus makes them the firstborn. What the sources agree on is what happened next. Their father looked at them and could not bear the sight. He pushed each of them back down into the body of their mother as soon as it was born, deep into the earth where the light does not reach.

That is a cold place to spend an age. The prison was damp and lightless and pressed close on every side, and a hundred hands had nothing to grip but stone. Gaia, carrying them inside her, felt the weight of it and did not forget. When the younger gods rose against the Titans and the fighting dragged on for ten years without an ending, she gave her counsel: free the ones below, and the war would turn. In one telling Zeus goes down into Tartarus, kills the dragon Campe who keeps the gate, and brings the brothers up into the daylight. He feeds them nectar and ambrosia until the strength comes back into their limbs, and then he asks them to fight.

They did not need asking twice. Standing with the Olympians on the field, the three of them reached down and began to throw. A hundred hands apiece meant a storm of stone that never paused to reload, boulder after boulder rising and falling until the Titans could not see the sky through the barrage. When it was over the defeated gods were driven down beneath the wide earth and bound in chains, and the same brothers who had broken them were set to keep them there. The hundred-handers became the wardens of Tartarus, standing at the gate of the pit they had once been thrown into, on the other side of the door now.

One of them, Briareus, rose higher than the rest. Hesiod calls him good and marks him out for reward: Poseidon gave him his daughter Cymopolea to wife, which is about as close to belonging as a monster of that age ever came. Homer tells a stranger story still. When Hera, Poseidon, and Athena once conspired to bind Zeus and pull him down, it was the sea goddess Thetis who saved him, and she did it by fetching Briareus up to Olympus. He climbed the mountain and sat down beside the throne, and the sight of him settling there was enough. The gods who had meant to chain their king looked at the thing on the step below him and thought better of the whole idea. Homer adds a detail that lingers: mortals called him Aegaeon, though the gods called him Briareus, and he was mightier than his own father.

That is the shape of their power, and its limit. Their gift was raw, tireless force, a hundred hands that could not be worn down and could not be outnumbered, and it made them the deciding weight on whichever side they stood. It also made them impossible to leave free. Every part of their story is someone else’s decision. Their father buried them, Gaia remembered them, Zeus released them, and once the war was won he sent them straight back underground to stand guard. They were too dangerous to keep and too useful to destroy. So they were kept, at the bottom of everything, holding shut the door on the enemies they had put there.

They belong to the world’s first age, before heroes, before cities, when the quarrels were between the sky and the earth and the ground itself could be picked up and thrown. Nothing in the later myths is built on their scale. When the poets need to say that a force is beyond reckoning, beyond counting, beyond argument, they reach back to the three brothers with the fifty faces and the two hundred hands between them, and let the arithmetic do the frightening.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Hecatonchires?

The Hecatonchires, or Hundred-Handed Ones, are three giant brothers in Greek mythology, each with fifty heads and one hundred arms. Named Cottus, Briareus, and Gyges, they were children of Uranus and Gaia and among the oldest and strongest beings in the Greek cosmos.

What role did the Hecatonchires play in the Titanomachy?

The Hecatonchires were the deciding force in the war between the Olympians and the Titans. After Zeus freed them from their underground prison, they hurled barrages of three hundred boulders at a time at the Titans, overwhelmed them, and helped bind them beneath the earth.

Why were the Hecatonchires imprisoned?

Their father Uranus hated the Hecatonchires and pushed each one back into the earth as soon as it was born. They stayed trapped underground until Gaia advised the younger gods to free them, and Zeus brought them up to fight in the Titanomachy.

Who is Briareus and how is he different from his brothers?

Briareus is the most prominent of the three Hecatonchires, singled out by Hesiod as “good” and rewarded by Poseidon with marriage to his daughter Cymopolea. In Homer’s Iliad, the goddess Thetis summons Briareus to Olympus to protect Zeus from a revolt, and mortals knew him by the name Aegaeon.

What happened to the Hecatonchires after the war?

After the Titans were defeated, Zeus set the Hecatonchires to guard the gates of Tartarus and keep watch over the imprisoned Titans. The same brothers who had once been jailed in the underworld became its wardens.